Yo, what's up everybody? Anton Kraly here on another rainy, 50 degree morning in Austin Texas. Driving into the office and yeah, welcome to the eCommerce Lifestyle podcast. This weather, on one hand, I don't like it because I'd rather not have to deal with rain but on the other hand it actually is making me pretty excited for Bali next week. Yeah, I guess it's like a blessing and a curse. I wanted to record this on the way into the office 'cause yesterday I actually got an episode recorded where I share my thoughts on building seed audiences on Facebook specifically and why it's so important for building brands. That kind of leads into what I'm going to be doing today when I get to work but not just for the brand building side of things but I'm actually going to be building audiences so that I am in a position to really win in Q4.

We are in Q4 already. In October, November, December of 2018 and as you probably know if you listen to this podcast, Q4 is by far the busiest shopping season for eCommerce stores and for retail stores in general and when things really start to get crazy, is about the middle of next month. Leading into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, towards everybody buying for Christmas, to New Year's. There's just so many opportunity for promotions and discounts and people buy like crazy.

It's basically it's becoming time to make some real money and obviously not just for me but for everybody that sells online. The message that I wanted to share with you today is that what far too many people do, far too many online retailers, is they wait. They wait until maybe it's a few days before Black Friday and then they ramp up their ad spend on Google and they ramp their ad spend on Facebook and Pinterest and Twitter and wherever else they're advertising and they think like, okay cool, we're going into this holiday season. Time to up my budgets.

As you do that, so does everybody else that has a profitable store. What happens by default and there's no way to avoid this but what's going to happen as it does every year, is ad costs go up. CPMs go up. We spend more to get clicks. We spend more to get leads. We spend more to get customers. Now is that worth doing? The short answer is yes but the longer answer and the message I want to share with you because you're here with me today is that there is also an easier way because even though you could just spend more from call it, mid November through New Year's day and make a lot more money, you can also start spending more money now and be in a better position to have a better return on ad spend throughout the busiest part of the quarter.

Now, this is something that a lot of people don't but again because you're an eCommerce Lifestyle listener, 'cause you're here, I'll share kind of our game plan and what I recommend you doing as well. We actually started this a few weeks ago. I'm going to be scaling up some budgets today. What we're doing is building what I call our holiday audiences. The holiday audiences are the people that we are going to run our promotions to. Not all of them but a large portion of our promotions to on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, on Pinterest, on YouTube, on Google, everywhere.

Right now because ad costs haven't went up yet but people are still out there, they're still shopping, we are upping all of our normal budgets. And I'm okay to up my budgets and have a little bit less of return on ad spend for the next 30 days. Meaning, if I just let's say I doubled one of my budgets from, I'm just make up numbers. If I doubled it from 100 to 200 and my return on ad spend didn't go up proportionately, that's fine because now my audience of people that are interested 'cause they clicked my ads, they went to my website, has gone up dramatically for new hot leads, people in the last 30 days that are interested in what I have to sell.

Then what that means is middle of next month, once we really start pushing our Black Friday and Cyber Monday promos, when I'm running my remarketing ads, I have a 30 day, massive list of people that have already shown interest and because the ads that we're going to be pushing really hard on, again in about call it 30 days from now, the people that they're going to be showing to are people I'm remarketing to which means even though my CPMs will be higher than normal, they're going to be no where near as high as if I just decided to raise my budgets then, once everybody else is doing it to cold audiences. To people with search intents. Those are going to go up a lot more than trying to reach the people through remarketing which is always going to be your best return on ad spend campaigns especially around the holiday season.

Again, yes we're going to remarket to people that have been visiting our websites throughout the last 180 days but specifically the people that are coming now because this is when we're raising our budgets. We are going to go hard with remarketing campaigns with them coming up very soon and I know from previous experience kind of what I can expect for return on ad spends amongst our websites and yeah, it's an exciting time.

Again, just wanted to record this quick one to share that with you. If you are running an eCommerce store, you're selling physical products, don't wait to bump your budgets to when everybody does it. Bump your budgets now. Be okay with having the next 30 days, may not be your best return on ad spend ever in the world but that's fine because just know that when middle of November rolls around next month, that's when you're going to really starting pushing hard with your remarketing. You're going to have a massive hot list of people and your sales if you do things right, should go through the roof and you should have one of your best months ever.

Yeah, that's my quick tip for today. Again, most people don't do it but because you're listening to this podcast, you will and you will have a very successful Q4. I actually, I started recording this one when I was like halfway to the office so I'm here already. I'm cold. I'm going to go inside, have some coffee and start today and yeah, hope you have a great, what day is it? Tuesday. And again, for everybody coming out to Bali next week, look forward to seeing you there. If not, be sure to go check out dropshiplifestyle.com so maybe you can join us for our next events which just confirm the spot. I'm not going to give the exact country yet but I will say it is in Europe and it is coming soon. Yeah, make sure you go enroll in Drop Ship Lifestyle if you want to hear about that.

Oh, and let me briefly mention this too. For anybody that's listening to this that is part of Drop Ship Lifestyle, if you're a member and you go to the website, you're going to see a big, big, big, big message that says that we are closing October 29th and that is true. Drop Ship Lifestyle is closing on October 29th but do not worry. That is not going to affect you if you already are a member. If you purchase access and enroll before October 29th, you are in. You're grandfathered in there. You're not going to lose your account. That's just for people that go and try to sign up after October 29th. If you're a member, nothing changes. You're all good. I'm still here to support you. If you're not a member yet, go sign up 'cause this is going to be one of your last chances to get Drop Ship Lifestyle version 6.0 with free lifetime updates at the price that it is now.

Check that out and with that being said guys, I'll talk to you all in the next episode of eCommerce Lifestyle. See you.